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[Official] HD 7970 Reviews

IvanDobskey said:
So this thing is probably 25% faster than my £185 GTX480 and costs £500? I'll be sticking with my 480 thanks AMD :p
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Thats the price you pay for top end performance. You could say that about anything thats new when it comes out.
 
This isn't as bad a card as some people make it out to be. Did it live up the hype? No. Does it offer a meaningful leap in performance across the board? Yes. Is the price okay? At low £400s it is. AMD aren't going to give you a card faster than GTX 580 and with 3GB of RAM for anything equal to or less than GTX 580 3GB prices. I'd also like to say that perhaps CPUs are bottlenecking these, but it makes me wonder... I mean, the 590s and 6990s are performing a bit better and surely if CPU rather than the GPU was the limiter I'd expect the 7970 vs Dual GPU cards gaps to close a bit more.

That said, all NVIDIA really needs to do to compete on the same turf here is release overclocked versions of GTX 580s with 3GB RAM. Would require a board redesign perhaps. 1000MHz-1100MHz on the core should just about seal the deal. And there are EVGA GTX 580 Classifieds out there that clock to 1500-1600MHz on the core beating out even GTX 590 with a single GPU. The major question is can ~1000Mhz be safely and consistently achieved on air?

But even if it it can be done I'd bet NVIDIA is not interested. They have their 580s where they want them and will probably just continue to work on Kepler.

Meanwhile, for the end-user with a GTX 580 this is probably not a worthwhile upgrade to consider (which is the cause of a lot of "whine" from the NVIDIA "fanboys". I'm sure many were considering an upgrade. I would've been one of those if I wasn't tied to 3D Vision and CUDA)... But for anyone with a 6970 or any other card it's perhaps more of an attractive upgrade. I haven't looked at the numbers but this should at least match 6950 XFIRE for roughly the same cost? And no multi-GPU issues while being future proofed with an extra GB of memory. The trend seems to be towards increased memory usage in AAA games these days.
 
Well the card doesn't offer the massive gains some people were hoping for but it does offer some nice new features. I will wait a couple of months for new drivers and prices to calm down before passing judgment.

There are a lot of possibilities here. Either wait for the 7950 or see how the 7850/7870 perform in Crossfire.

I am more interested in this card's performance in Folding@home. I saw a couple of Compute benchmarks in reviews but l didn't spot one with folding@home. Will be interesting to see how the card performs there.
 
Klo said:
Thats the price you pay for top end performance. You could say that about anything thats new when it comes out.
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Thing is, although it is top end performance, it isn't by much distance. Certainly not by enough to warrant the price premium though. If it cost the same as a 580 then it would be a good purchase.
 
All those people with crazy overclocks on their 580 are pushing their luck if you ask me, especially when you consider that all them with overclocks worth mentioning are using significantly higher voltages. For the past couple of generations I've seen unsually high numbers of people with dead top end nvidia cards a year or two down the line and a large portion of them have been overclocking like mad. The number of times I've seen people on this forum and others, making posts about their dead 8800, 280/285, 480, etc seems to far outweigh their AMD counterparts.
 
titaniumx3 said:
All those people with crazy overclocks on their 580 are pushing their luck if you ask me, especially when you consider that all them with overclocks worth mentioning are using significantly higher voltages. For the past couple of generations I've seen unsually high numbers of people with dead top end nvidia cards a year or two down the line and a large portion of them have been overclocking like mad. The number of times I've seen people on this forum and others, making posts about their dead 8800, 280/285, 480, etc seems to far outweigh their AMD counterparts.
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I agree with this. Video cards are not anywhere near as robust as CPU's. For this very reason, I have never overclocked any video card I have owned. I'll save the overclocking for my CPU.
 
IvanDobskey said:
Thing is, although it is top end performance, it isn't by much distance. Certainly not by enough to warrant the price premium though. If it cost the same as a 580 then it would be a good purchase.
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It will cost roughly the same or slightly more than a 580 3gb and offer a good 15 - 25% increase in performance (especially when drivers mature, of which there is good precendent for), so I'm not sure what else you expect? Top end parts will never be good value for money and there's only ever been a few examples contradicting this, like for example the 4870 when it was released.

For 580 users, sure it's not very appealing, but for anyone with anything lower in than a 580, you'd be crazy to to go for a 580 instead of 7970, unless of course the prices for the 580 3gb drop significantly.
 
IvanDobskey said:
I agree with this. Video cards are not anywhere near as robust as CPU's. For this very reason, I have never overclocked any video card I have owned. I'll save the overclocking for my CPU.
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That is absurd. Overclocking your video card will give you far more of a gain than overclocking the CPU, and is just as safe.
 
i don't understand why the negative comment

it clearly has beaten the 580

i don't understand why eveyone thinks next nvidia card will be ground breaking when nothing solid has been released

well they clearly done a better job on this than bulldozer!!! :o

i'll wait see what the mid range card is like
i never buy top end, its just crazy money. :(
 
Guru said:
You can say how much I think, but Defo not where.

Anyone know if 570's are dropping?
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I noticed the GTX 580s have gone up in price £20-£30 today. So I doubt the 570 are dropping but will go up too or have gone up (I don't really keep an eye on 570 prices).

Asus GeForce GTX 580 DirectCU II 1536MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card [ENGTX580 DCII/2DIS/1536MD5]

were £359.99 inc VAT yesterday and today £379.99 inc VAT

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-249-AS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1812


Asus GeForce GTX 580 Matrix Platinum 1536MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card [Matrix GTX580 P/2DIS/1536MD5]

were £419.99 inc VAT or even £409.99 inc VAT yesterday and today £439.99 inc VAT.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-260-AS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1812

It clearly is highlighting the 7970 is going to hit at £500 odd.. and retailers have realised the 7970 is not such a huge leap forward and will price their cards now to show this.


We will have to wait till the 7970 is in stock to get a real idea but im guessing the 7950 will be inbetween 570 and 580 speeds and maybe a bit higher for some benchmarks and will be priced like a 580.

Ohh well ..:( Nvidia may bring out a die shrunk 580 and have higher clocks soon but who knows they really don't have to rush anything at the moment. Will be a boring year until Kepler is out, we already know Ivybridge is <10% faster then Sandybridge and it's only faster on the GPU inside it, which most of us don't use anyway.
 
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It looks like Drunkmaster got it wrong.....who would have thought it!

DMPrediction.jpg


50% faster then the GTX580?

Time for my prediction. I predict that drunkmaster will say he didn't get it wrong and that's not what he said at all and what he actually said was...........
 
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Freddie1980 said:
It looks like Drunkmaster got it wrong.....who would have thought it!

DMPrediction.jpg


50% faster then the GTX580?

Time for my prediction. I predict that drunkmaster will say he didn't get it wrong and that's not what he said at all and what he actually said was...........
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This is why I have the guy on my ignore list.
 
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